By the Sea

The narrative of exile in By the Sea is deeply rooted in the political upheaval that transformed the author’s homeland. For centuries, the island’s location attracted commercial interests from Portugal to Persia, with Omani Arabs eventually solidifying control of the region in the mid-17th century and establishing an independent sultanate in 1861. From 1890 onward, however, this sultanate generally served the interests of the British colonial regime, which established the island as a protectorate. The ruling Arab minority was thus unpopular with Zanzibar’s African majority, and in January 1964, just a month after the territory gained its independence from Britain, the Zanzibar Revolution overthrew the ruling sultanate and established a repressive, one-party state under the Afro-Shirazi Party. The revolution was marked by intense violence, with historical estimates indicating that thousands—possibly tens of thousands—of Arab and South Asian Zanzibaris were killed in the immediate aftermath (Salahi, Amr. “Zanzibar: Arabs, Africans and a Forgotten Legacy of Slavery and Ethnic Cleansing.” The New Arab, 3 Jul. 2020).

In the following years, the new government’s policies led to widespread political persecution and the exodus of many citizens. Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar in 1948 to a Yemeni immigrant, was among those who fled, arriving in Britain as a refugee at the age of 18. This history directly shapes the novel’s plot and themes. The protagonist, Saleh Omar, begins his story by declaring, “I am a refugee, an asylum seeker” (6), mirroring the author’s own journey. The fictional account of state-sponsored persecution, imprisonment, and the psychological toll of displacement draws from the real-world experiences of those affected by the revolution. For example, the protagonist’s fear of officials and his years spent in detention camps reflect the harsh realities of the post-revolutionary regime. Gurnah’s 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature citation specifically highlighted his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of […] the fate of the refugee,” a theme born from this pivotal sociohistorical context (“Abdulrazak Gurnah: Facts.” The Nobel Prize).